Our time-traveler asks the present owner of his old home what happened. But nothing really “happened”: it just turned out this way. It was never luxurious, but it was a nice neighborhood, and you knew who your neighbors were. The tough times were a few blocks away, with the repossessed homes and the abandoned cars on bricks in the yard. But then the couple three houses down got foreclosed on, and the bank put their property up for sale, and nobody bought. So now the boarded up homes aren’t a few streets away, but next door. And the night is full of sounds: the word gets round that Number 23 and Number 29 are empty, and people break in for copper wiring or anything else there’s a market or a need for. And sometimes they bust in just because they’re up to something and require a place where they know they won’t be disturbed. So the drug dealers creep a little closer, and then the shootings.
On Wall Street, recessions are “cyclical.” Out in the hinterland, the cycle settles in, and it’s vicious: abandoned homes lead to more crime lead to more abandoned homes lead to even more crime lead to even more abandoned homes…. A lifetime’s labor has gone to pay the mortgage on a house that will never be worth in real terms what you paid for it and that now stands in a neighborhood the old you—the young you, the one with modest dreams of a better life earned through effort—would never want to live in.
So our time-traveler listens to the present owner of his old home explain that, yes, they could rent out the upstairs, but, even though the Bureau of Compliance at the city Department of Furnished Accommodation approved their fire retardant cushions, the state Agency of Access & Equality says they need a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator. And, even if they could afford that, the only place they could put it is where that ugly old poplar is, and taking that down requires permission from the Board of Environmental Impact, which has a three-year backlog of tree-removal cases. They could just cut it down, and gamble that no one would check, but Ken and Ron down the street did it and got fined, and, even though they’re appealing to the Human Rights Commission on the grounds that the fine was homophobic, it wouldn’t be the same for them because they’re not in any minority category, not since the state Supreme Court ruled that diabetes no longer qualified because too many people have it….
The gentleman from 1890 suddenly realizes that for the last ten minutes he has had absolutely no idea what this lady is talking about, but he has an overwhelming desire to get back on his time-machine before the youths sitting on the wall opposite strip it for parts and he winds up stuck forever in… well, whatever country this is. “America” doesn’t seem quite the word.
You don’t have to engage in H. G. Wells speculations about the near future. Put a time-traveler from 1950 in Detroit sixty years later. He, too, would doubt he’d landed in the same country. For decades, Americans watched the decline of a great city and told themselves it was an outlier.
It didn’t used to be: “When General Motors sneezes, America catches a cold.” When Detroit gets the ebola virus, America is surely in line to catch something—unless you’re entirely convinced that its contagion can be quarantined. Half-a-century ago, the city was the powerhouse of the world. Now it’s a wasteland. It’s a motor city with no motor, a byword for industrial decline and civic collapse that Big Government liberals seem determined to make their template. To residents of the mid-twentieth century it would have seemed incredible that one day the president of the United States would fire the CEO of General Motors and personally call the mayor of Detroit to assure him he had no plans to move the company’s head office out of the city. By the time it actually happened, it provoked barely a murmur.11
In 2009, General Motors had a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail.12 For purposes of comparison, GM’s market capitalization was then about $2.4 billion versus Toyota’s $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM).13 General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a sprawling retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The United Auto Workers is the AARP in an Edsel: it has three times as many retirees and widows as “workers” (I use the term loosely).14 GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan were making a pretax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler, and GM a loss of $500 to $1,500.15
That’s to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it’s red.
